The President. In the Oval Office. With Good Intelligence.

Well, good!

President Bush told the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case that he directed Vice President Dick Cheney to personally lead an effort to counter allegations made by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that his administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war with Iraq, according to people familiar with the president’s statement.

Did anyone expect him to do differently? The idea that the administation would let a lickspittle like Joseph Wilson go around the country basically lying through his teeth unchallenged by those pesky, pesky facts he hates so much is just crazy.

So Bush set the Vice President to clean up Wilson’s slime trail. Which he did. More, he gave the VP some weapons.

Bush also told federal prosecutors during his June 24, 2004, interview in the Oval Office that he had directed Cheney, as part of that broader effort, to disclose highly classified intelligence information that would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson, the sources said.

Again, not a surprise. And, as a lot of people have found, not illegal, since the sole authority on what is and is not classified is the President of the United States. That’s one of the big jobs we elect him to do.

This, I’d say, is why Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation has failed to produce so much as a misdemeanor crime when it comes to the “outing” of Valerie Plame. Sure, he indicted Scooter Libby for making a false statement, but that’s a) tengential to his investigation, and b) on very thin ice.

Right now, this whole Fitzmas thing is looking like a wet fizzle, which it was from the very beginning.

Oh, and here’s your bad journalism alert, too.

Wilson had led a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger in March 2002 to investigate claims that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was attempting to buy enriched uranium from the African nation to build a nuclear weapon. Wilson reported back to the CIA that the allegations were almost certainly not true. Still, President Bush cited the Niger allegations during his 2003 State of the Union address as evidence that Saddam had an aggressive program to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Is there a chance that we can get someone who can read to write these stories? The President did not cite any allegations about Niger during that address. He said that Saddam Hussein was trying to get uranium from Africa which, as we know, is slightly larger and composed of a nation or two that aren’t called Niger. He got that information from British intelligence, which to this day stands behind that report and has a government investigative commission’s findings to back it up.

The Plame story has been too full of conjecture as it is. We still don’t need reporters making stuff up, especially when it’s stuff that’s so easy to refute.

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Category: Fighting the Islamists, Oh, THAT liberal media.